Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html"Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96," New York Times, May 21, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html

Ruth Freitag, a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for nearly a half-century, was unknown to the general public. But she was, in more ways than one, a librarian to the stars.

...

In a way, Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process.

“Ruth was known for her ability to find a needle in a haystack,” Ms. Carter said.

Her strong suit was compiling epic bibliographic guides and resources. Her notable subjects included the star of Bethlehem, the flat earth theory and women in astronomy. But her crowning achievement was her illustrated, annotated, 3,235-entry bibliography on Halley’s comet, replete with citations of books, journals, charts and pamphlets, as well as references in fiction, music, cartoons and paintings. It was indexed and bound and published by the Library of Congress in 1984, just in time for the celebrated comet’s last pass-by of Earth in 1986. Even the Halley’s Comet Society in London called Ms. Freitag for information.

“These bibliographies would take months and even years to do,” said Jennifer Harbster, head of the science reference section at the Library of Congress. “It wasn’t like you just found a title and put it in your bibliography. She would annotate it all.”

COMMENT

  Ruth Freitag's job is described as knowing more about how to find scientific information than Isaac Asimov or Carl Sagan.  She answered reference questions and complied annotated bibliographies. Sometimes she helped with things like copy editing that were probably outside of her job description. The obituary notes that authors frequently thanked her for her help in the forewords to their books (always a good place to look for library stories). 

The obituary writer implies that Freitag's skills have been rendered obsolete by Google, but Google won't annotate or evaluate anything for you.  As the Internet has become a source of disinformation, propaganda  and unsubstantiated lies, perhaps the skill of compiling epic bibliographies is due for a revival.

 

Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo

Elizabeth A. Harris,  "Publishing Trade Show Replaces BookExpo." New York Times May 17, 2021, p. C2. 

The Book Show, which will be held virtually May 25-27, is aimed at librarians, independent booksellers and book buyers from major chain stores. It is intended to help publishers push their biggest fall titles, which is when many of the biggest books of the year are released in advance of the crucial holiday shopping season.

COMMENT

    Librarians are part of the target audience for a Book Show held by the publishing industry.   The article implies that librarians have a role in helping sell predicted best sellers, but they also have a role in promoting "sleepers" that deserve more promotion than they got. 

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

 

Daniel Markovitz "How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning", Atlantic, May 6, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

Changes in the weightings so tiny that they are obviously arbitrary make material differences in the rankings. In this year’s law-school report, U.S. News issued multiple corrections—for example, eliminating a 0.25 percent weight for the “credit-bearing hours of instruction provided by law librarians to full-time equivalent law students” (whatever that is) and increasing the weighting of the bar-passage rate by 0.25 percent. These maneuvers altered the rank of 35 law schools, including nine in the top 30.

COMMENT

     This article about the fierce competition to get into elite colleges cites library instruction as a particularly absurd measure of excellence.   Apparently, law students are no longer expected to know how to do their research. 

Rereading Lolita

 Ian Frazier, "Rereading Lolita" New Yorker, December 14, 2020 pp. 30-35.

As an unformed kid, I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain. I tried to imitate the style, dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases (“I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette”). Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I’ve met has heard of. It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find. Published in 1947, the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev—with Nabokov’s translations, accompanied by introductions in which he explains each poet to an American audience. In the introduction to Pushkin, he describes the poet’s end, when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the alleged lover of his wife. About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia’s greatest poet, Nabokov adds that d’Anthès went back to France, got elected to some office or other, “and lived to the incredible and unnecessary age of 90."

COMMENT

     It seems that Ian Frazier learned to write by imitating Nabokov.   While searching the library for all things Nabokov he finds a neglected volume of translated poems and actually reads the introduction (something not everyone does).  There he finds a perfect putdown for a historical nobody -- Hidden Treasure luring in plain sight. 

South Africa wildfire burns University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities

Lesley Wroughton "South Africa wildfire burns University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities", Washington Post, April 19, 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/18/south-africa-fire-university-cape-town/

Officials from the University of Cape Town, known as UCT, said the Jagger Library, which houses priceless African studies collections, was among the buildings that burned.

“At this stage, we can confirm the Reading Room is completely gutted and thankfully the fire detection system in place triggered the fire shutters, thereby preventing the spread of the fire to other parts of the library,” Ujala Satgoor, executive director of UCT Libraries, said in a statement.“Some of our valuable collections have been lost,” she said. “However a full assessment can only be done once the building has been declared safe and we can enter.”

The library houses printed and audiovisual materials on African studies as well as 1,300 sub-collections of unique manuscripts and personal papers, and more than 85,000 books and pamphlets on African studies including up-to-date materials and works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, according to the UCT website. It also contains one of the most extensive African film collections in the world, the website added.

The university’s vice chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng, confirmed that some parts of the African Studies Collection were destroyed.

“The library is of course our greatest loss,” she told CapeTalk radio. “Some of these cannot be replaced by insurance, and that is a sad day for us.”

COMMENT 

As with the 2018 fire at the National Museum in Brazil, the loss of library archives is a severe cultural loss.  Other buildings can be rebuilt, but once one-of-a-kind endangered information is lost, it is lost for good.  Since the African studies collection contained documentation of non-literate cultures, the loss of archives makes it that much harder for African scholars to research cultural identity. 

Shelf Lives

 Min Jin Lee, "Shelf Lives", New York Times Book Review,  April 18, 2021 p. 1, 20-21.

     On a day off, Uncle John went to the New York Public Library to check the classifieds.  He noticed that computer programmers had high starting salaries, so he borrowed books on programming.  the former history graduate student read library books on computer science.  Not long after, he got a job at an insurance company, then, later, I.B.M. hired him as a programmer, where he worked for most of his life.

     In 1975, Uncle John, now an I.B.M. company man sponsored his younger sister's family to immigrate from South Korea.  A year later, we came to Elmhurst, Queens, where Uncle John, his wife and their two American-born daughters lived.  I was 7.

     In our first year in America, Uncle John took my tow sisters and me to the library in Elmhurst and got us cards.   We could borrow as many books as we liked, he said.  We loaded up our metal grocery cart with its tilted black wheels and white plastic hubs.  It creaked all the way home.  

COMMENT

    This single narrative tells a complete immigrant story.  The public library is the pathway to a better job, which enables Uncle John to sponsor other family members to come to America.  In the article Min Jin Lee, reminisces about the library books she read as a child and what they taught her about "the ethos of American rugged individualism and the Korean quest for knowledge.  Based on what she learned from years of reading, she is writing a series of novels about Korean Americans, so just as it did for Uncle John, the library also provided a vocation for the author.

Mary Ellen Moylan, Acclaimed Balanchine Dancer, Is Dead at 94

 Roslyn Sulcas "Mary Ellen Moylan, Acclaimed  Balanchine Dancer, Is Dead at 94" New York Times April 14, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/arts/dance/mary-ellen-moylan-dead.html?auth=login-google 

Ms. Moylan had become “the first great Balanchine dancer." And yet her death, almost a year ago, went largely unnoticed in the dance world. Even a collection devoted to her in the archives of the University of Oklahoma School of Dance makes no mention of her death; neither do various biographical sketches of her online. Word of her death, however, began to trickle out through social media, and her daughter-in-law, Carol Bailes, recently confirmed it: Ms. Moyland died on April 28, 2020, in Redmond, Wash. She was 94. The family said she had had dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

COMMENT

An obituary of an influential dancer is also a commentary on the importance of journalism.  When Moyland died nobody reported it.  The library archive, dependent on published sources, had no record of her death.  In an age when journalism is in danger, so is the historical record held by libraries.